More often than not, there is no reference to ‘Time’ in the index of books on psychoanalysis. This evidence of a lack of psychoanalytic writing on time is striking because temporality forms such an important theme of Freud’s work. The timeless unconscious; Nachträglichkeit; the endless repetition compulsion; and the processes of consciousness, remembering and working through: all these involve temporality. André Green asked rhetorically: ‘Was there ever a point in Freud’s work where he was not concerned by the subject of time?’ (Green 2002, p. 9); if there was, it is difficult to find.
Psychoanalytic theory is permeated by time, and the practice of psychoanalysis seems shaped by it. It is largely the losses that time brings with it which take us into the consulting room: loss of our youth, our opportunities, our loved ones and our future. At the outset, the parties to a psychotherapeutic alliance make a substantial commitment to spend significant time together, and a condition of whether what happens between them is psychoanalysis is the quantity of time, in terms of number of sessions per week, which they share together. Within the sessions themselves, the temporal boundaries are usually strictly observed. Hilda Doolittle’s account of her analysis with Freud includes a nice example: ‘The other day the Professor had reproached me for jerking out my arm and looking at my watch. He had said, “I keep an eye on the time. I will tell you when the session is over. You need not keep looking at the time, as if you were in a hurry to get away”’ (Doolittle 1971, p. 17).
The paradox is this: time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis, yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. Although temporal themes run throughout Freud’s work, his specific references to time are highly qualified, any idea of a theory of time being couched in terms of ‘hints’ (Freud 1920, p. 28) or ‘suspicions’ (Freud 1925b, p. 23). Freud seemed extremely reluctant to make his thoughts on time public. In 1914, for example, having seen from the Jahrbuch proofs that Tausk intended to refer to a comment Freud had made connecting time and space to the conscious and unconscious systems at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud insisted that all reference to his comment be removed from Tausk’s paper (Freud 1914d).1 Later in the same year, Freud wrote to Ferenczi: ‘[S]omething […] is in process which shouldn’t be talked about yet. […] I only want to reveal to you that, on paths that have been trodden for a long time, I have finally found the solution to the riddle of time and space’ (Freud 1914e, pp. 29–30). Freud wrote in similar terms to Abraham on the same day (Freud 1914f, p. 30), but neither letter goes on to reveal the riddle’s solution. By 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud was claiming that an ‘exhaustive treatment’ of Kant’s philosophy of time and space was necessary in the light of his psychoanalytic findings (Freud 1920, p. 28) but this treatment never really follows. And, in one of Freud’s last published letters to Marie Bonaparte, whilst he generously praises her paper, ‘Time and the Unconscious’ (Bonaparte 1940), Freud lets her know that she lacked any grounds to write about his ideas on time because he had not divulged them: ‘Your comments on “time and space” have come off better than mine would have—although so far as time is concerned I hadn’t fully informed you of my ideas. Nor anyone else’ (Freud 1938e, p. 455).
Not only is there a lack of a consolidated account by Freud of his theory of time, but there is also a marked absence in the secondary literature of its remedy. In 1989, Andrea Sabbadini was able to say that: ‘In recent years, several authors have published their views on various aspects of time in psychoanalysis, but with the exception of Arlow (1984), and Hartocollis, no one has explored these themes systematically or offered original perspectives about their significance’ (Sabbadini 1989, p. 305). And André Green, in his 2002 work, Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects, wrote: ‘I have often pointed out that contemporary psychoanalysis has come up with many ingenious solutions for the problems raised by the notion of space, but barely any with regard to that of time’ (Green 2002, p. 4). More recently, Green wrote: ‘It is striking that the problem of time has been the source of far fewer discussions than themes relating to space. It would seem that this theme has been avoided’ (Green 2009, p. 1).
In identifying the lack in the literature of a systematic account of Freud’s theory of time, Sabbadini and Green position themselves as contributors to its remedy. Sabbadini identifies two further contributors: Hartocollis and Arlow. These four are members of a small group which writes specifically about psychoanalysis and temporality, the first member of which was Marie Bonaparte. She published her classic paper, ‘Time and the Unconscious’, at the very end of Freud’s life (Bonaparte 1940). Bonaparte’s paper is one usually rather reverentially referred to in any psychoanalytic writing on time. Hartocollis goes so far as to credit the paper alongside Freud’s own work as ‘a landmark in its own right’ (Hartocollis 1974, p. 244).2 Bonaparte asserts that those who come to consciousness too early are likely to be haunted by the idea of time slipping away: ‘Throughout their whole life [time] will continue to exhale gusts of timelessness which will affect even their adult sense of time’ (Bonaparte 1940, p. 442). But Bonaparte’s ‘gusts of timelessness’ remain unexplored and we learn no more about her claim that ‘we destroy time from the moment we begin to use it’ (ibid, p. 431). Bonaparte provides, as purported proof of the ‘lethal significance’ of time, our personification of time but not of space. But she offers nothing to support her argument that the concepts we personify have lethal significance. And she erroneously suggests that philosophers loathe and thus suppress the idea of time (ibid, p. 454), managing to canter over the philosophies of time of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant and Bergson in the space of a few glib paragraphs, concluding that philosophy is the ‘occupation par excellence of the crazy creature man so often is’ (ibid, p. 483). As a technical contribution to the psychoanalytic discourse on time, Bonaparte’s paper is, I think, limited. That said, there is value in her record of Freud’s views about time, provided that a qualification about its accuracy is borne in mind: for (as I indicated above) Freud wrote to Bonaparte after the publication of her paper to say that he had not fully informed her, or anyone else, of his ideas about time. Some of the points Freud made to Bonaparte, as recorded in her paper, are, however, corroborated by their contemporary correspondence, and they add to our understanding of Freud’s thoughts on how we make time.
After Bonaparte, little is said about Freud’s theory of time until Lacan brought attention to Freud’s temporal notion of the après-coup. British psychoanalytic writing on time is scanty, rich, instead, in the provision of spatial metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts represented by Bion’s container, Winnicott’s transitional space, Steiner’s psychic retreats, and Meltzer’s claustrum. In France, on the other hand, acknowledgement of the importance of the après-coup became what Green describes as a fundamental theoretical axis of psychoanalytic practice (Green 2002, p. 7) leading to the development of new theories of temporality in Lacan’s notion of logical time, Laplanche’s insistence of the inclusion of the Other in any theory of time, and Green’s notions of exploded time, anti-time and murdered time. Lacan’s theory of time is principally contained in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (Lacan 2006). This paper describes what Lacan takes to be the component moments of logical time: the instance of the glance; the time of understanding; and the moment of concluding. Lacan’s use of the prisoner’s dilemma, as elegantly expounded by Derek Hook in ‘Logical Time, Symbolic Identification, and the Trans-subjective’ (Hook 2013) and John Forrester in his The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Forrester 1990, p. 178 et seq), serves to provide a logical analysis of the (variable) time it takes for us to draw inferences based on our subjective interactions with others. In Lacan’s view, the time for understanding is what takes place between psychoanalytic sessions, hence his controversial punctuated endings, to initiate the time of understanding, a practice to which strict Lacanians still adhere.3 Lacan does not seem to provide an analysis of the nature of time itself nor of Freud’s theory of it but instead his own interpretation of what happens during time. Further, there seems to be an inherent incompatibility between Lacan’s view that the unconscious is structured like a language and Freud’s understanding that the unconscious is timeless. The unconscious is not structured like language or anything else: Freud insists on a negative reading of the timeless processes of the unconscious so that they can only be understood in terms of what conscious processes are not (Freud 1920, p. 28, 1933, p. 73). Language brings with it tenses which imply the temporal order that Freud is adamant is lacking in the unconscious. André Green and Jean Laplanche share the view that Lacan’s formulation of the unconscious is incompatible with that of Freud (Green 1999b, p. 24; Laplanche 1992, p. 26).4 The incompatibility of Lacan’s view of the unconscious with that of Freud together with Lacan’s failure to consider how we develop a notion of time from Freud’s perspective led to my conclusion that Lacan does not address the elements of Freud’s temporality which are central to my investigation. Laplanche, like Lacan, develops his own theory of time rather than elaborate that of Freud, making the Other an es...